Pluto AI raises $2.1M to bring intelligence to water treatment

On World Water Day, I’m excited to announce that we have raised $2.1M in funding from some of the top Silicon Valley VC firms including Refactor Capital (cofounded by David Lee of SV Angel and Zal Bilimoria of Andreessen Horowitz), Fall Line Capital (cofounded by Eric O’Brien of Lightspeed), 500 Startups, Unshackled Ventures, Jacob Gibson (cofounder of NerdWallet), and a few other amazing investors. With such an awesome team around us, 2017 is going to be fantastic

Pluto is an analytics platform for smart water management. We enable water facilities like treatment plants or beverage processing plants to prevent water wastage, predict asset health, and minimize operating costs. We use cutting edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve this. Our pilot customers include some of the largest water and beverage companies in the world.

Around 2.1 trillion gallons of clean water is lost in the US every year. With more than 150,000 water facilities in the country, this continues to be a massive problem.

Our goal is to address this issue by maximizing the water resource efficiency. Growing up in Gulbarga (town in southern India), I experienced the effects of water shortage firsthand. I feel that AI has been limited to first-world problems so far, which is why Pluto plans to use it to solve a meaningful problem like the ongoing water crisis. After having published 7 books on AI, I’ve become good friends with it.

Aging assets contribute heavily to water loss, with the average age of U.S. water pipes at 47 years. Replacing them is very expensive! We leverage large amounts of existing data to extract actionable insights that enables water facilities to manage their assets better. Pluto extracts wisdom from unstructured data in real time to enable operators and plant managers to take proactive action.

We are aiming to disrupt a massive industry that is in dire need of a solution. Andrew Ng very nicely posited that AI is the new electricity. It is transforming many industries and water is no different. Pluto is at the forefront of a huge wave of change in the world of water.